Sutekh kills everyone in the universe about fifteen minutes into this, which is a bold move, and then the finale has to find something to do for another forty. What it finds is a whistle, a spoon, a rope and an answer to the season’s central mystery that deflates it so completely I sat back in my chair. “Empire of Death” is the episode where this run’s problems stop being occasional and become the whole thing. I’d been looking forward to it, because the Sutekh cliffhanger was the best moment of the series. That makes the execution harder to forgive, not easier.
Killing everyone is a hard act to follow
The opening stretch is genuinely striking. The dust spreads, people crumble mid-sentence, and Kate Stewart and the whole UNIT cast are wiped out inside a few minutes. The show commits to it, with the death toll total and the universe emptied, while the Doctor and Ruby escape into a void. The trouble with erasing everything is that I know it’s coming back. There’s no version of this where the universe stays dead, so the middle act is spent watching two characters wander a grey nothing while I wait for the reset.
The episode tries to fill that with a scene about a woman and a child on a dead world, which is well played and completely disconnected from anything, and with a great deal of plot explained aloud to a spoon. The atmosphere is decent and the pacing isn’t. There’s a genuine charm to the Doctor assembling a way out of a void with junk, and the TARDIS built from his own memories is a lovely image. For a finale, though, an enormous amount of this hour is two people in a featureless void talking about what they might do next.
The rope
Sutekh is defeated by the Doctor tying a rope to him and towing him through the time vortex, which forces him to spread life instead of death, and then letting go. I’ve thought about it several times and I still find it embarrassing. This is a god of death, set up across two episodes and one classic serial as an unstoppable force, and the answer is a lasso. There’s a version of the idea that might have worked, where turning the villain’s own power against him is set up properly and costs something. Here it arrives as an improvisation with no groundwork and it’s over in under a minute.
The comparison that keeps occurring to me is Journey’s End, which is also an overstuffed finale that resolves too fast, but at least pays for its ending with Donna. Here nothing is spent. Everyone comes back, the dead are undone and Kate is fine. Even the emotional cost is refunded, which makes the opening fifteen minutes feel like a trick in hindsight.
What Gatwa does with it
None of this is his fault, and he’s very good throughout. There’s a stretch in the middle where the Doctor understands that everyone is dead and that he brought the thing that did it, and Gatwa plays that as a man barely holding himself together while staying useful. The scene where he breaks down properly, then puts himself back together because Ruby is watching, is the best acting in the finale. Six episodes in, this Doctor is fully formed: warm, quick, quietly furious, more openly emotional than any of his predecessors and never sentimental about it. The casting isn’t the problem with this era; the problem is that a lead this good keeps being handed finales that resolve themselves with a rope and a shrug.
The mystery, and why the ending lands so badly
Ruby’s mother turns out to be an ordinary woman. She isn’t a Time Lord or a god or connected to anything, just a frightened teenager who left her baby at a church and went on to live a normal life, and the pointing gesture the season treated as cosmic was her indicating a street sign. I can see the intended argument, which is that the mystery mattered because people believed it mattered, and an ordinary woman is a deliberate rebuke to a decade of companions turning out to be special. In principle I like that idea. Millie Gibson’s scenes with her birth mother are the best acting in the run, too.
The show didn’t earn it, though. The season built the mystery with snow falling indoors, a memory that could rewrite reality, a god riding the TARDIS because of it, and characters repeatedly telling me this was the most important question in the universe. Those are supernatural signals, not human ones. Answering them with “she was nobody” doesn’t reframe the season, it voids it after the fact, because the strange things around Ruby are still unexplained. There’s a sympathetic case for the ending and I’ve tried to meet it halfway, but snow doesn’t fall indoors because a teenager was scared.
That’s the failure that links this run to the one before it. The Timeless Children answered a season of questions with something nobody could act on, and this answers a season of questions by declaring they weren’t real. Mrs Flood is left entirely unexplained, turning to camera to promise that the Doctor’s story ends in horror, so one mystery is voided and the other left wide open. I’ll keep watching, largely for Gatwa, but I’d like the next run to decide what it’s about before it starts planting mysteries about it.
Rating: 2/5. Not my favourite at all. The opening is genuinely bold, Gatwa is very good throughout, and Gibson’s scenes with her birth mother are lovely. A god of death is beaten with a rope, though, a universe of deaths is undone at no cost, and a season-long mystery is resolved by announcing it was never a mystery. This is where the Gatwa run lost me.
